High Court to Consider DNA Innocence Claim

But investigators turned their attention to House when he was caught in several lies after the body was discovered. He told police he had been at his girlfriend's trailer the entire night of the murder; the girlfriend said he had left, then returned shirtless, sweating, covered with scratches and with a fresh bruise on the knuckle of his right ring finger.

Investigators found his blue jeans in a hamper at the trailer, stained with what looked like blood. FBI lab tests confirmed that the blood was Carolyn Muncey's.

A witness, Billy Ray Hensley, said he saw House on July 14 emerging from the creek bed near where Muncey's body was found later that day. Hensley said House appeared to be wiping his hands on a black piece of cloth. Prosecutors later claimed it was the shirt he had left behind at the crime scene.

"He wasn't in our minds until he fingered himself by coming up into the road," says W. Paul Phillips, the prosecutor who handled the case and who still serves as district attorney general for the section of eastern Tennessee that includes Luttrell.

At the February 1986 trial, Carolyn Muncey's 10-year-old daughter, Laura, testified that she heard a man with a deep voice calling from the road to her mother shortly before she disappeared, asking her to come with him to the creek bed because her husband had crashed his car there. The state theorized the voice was House's.

The jury was told a blood test showed that semen found on the underwear and nightgown worn by Muncey could have been House's.

Jurors from the House trial say today the combination of Carolyn Muncey's blood on House's jeans and Hensley's testimony convinced them of House's guilt. Laura Muncey's testimony was also compelling, jurors said, especially once they heard House's deep voice in court.

"From what they put on at the trial, I had no reasonable doubt," says Michael Boles, 46, an electrician who served on the jury.

Prosecutors did not charge House with rape. But Phillips used the semen evidence to imply a sexual motive for the crime. Under Tennessee law, rape or attempted rape is an aggravating factor that converts murder to a capital offense.

DNA testing was unavailable in 1986. It was not until October 1998 that House's lawyers were able to use it to prove the semen was Hubert Muncey Jr.'s.

The lawyers were already probing holes in the state's circumstantial case against House. The prosecutor's time line gave House barely an hour to travel two miles on foot from his girlfriend's trailer to the Muncey cabin, kill Carolyn in a fierce struggle, and return home. Hensley, driving along a road several hundred feet away, would have had difficulty seeing House climbing out of the creek bed.

In addition, a package containing vials of Carolyn Muncey's blood taken at an autopsy and shipped to the FBI for comparison to the stains on House's jeans came open at some point, and one vial's contents were never accounted for. A defense expert, Tennessee's assistant state chief medical examiner Cleland Blake, has testified in federal court that the rate of chemical decomposition evident in the blood on the jeans matched that of the blood in the vials, showing that it could have been spilled, intentionally or accidentally, from the containers.